We don’t like grey/silver teak and we know that is how it is meant to look naturally but sorry we like our wood brown!

So we spent some time investigating treatments that would make the wood look good but still allow it to breathe.  Varnish is a lot of work especially in the sun and we would have to sand down and reapply regularly or the wood would look awful.

Eventually, we opted to try International Paints Woodskin. A number of the forums ad good reviews of this and we thought it would make the teak table stand out.

We are really pleased with the results and this is one where a large number of light coats works a lot better than a thick coat.  It just needs reapplying every six to twelve months when you are in the sun and it will continue to look great.

Having had success in this area we decided to use it elsewhere on the boat but more of that later!

At some point prior to our ownership there had been a minor fire caused by a faulty dehumidifier.  This had caused fire, smoke and water damage.  Unfortunately, the previous owners had decided to repair the damage at the cheapest possible price and cut a number of corners.  Apart from rebuilding the galley that makes maintenance even more difficult than it was before, they had also decided to “enhance” the interior by fitting the units in the galley with Formica.  This meant that the French polisher I asked to refurbish the saloon shortly after we got Mariadz, pretty much laughed in my face about the chances of being able to match the wood.  Apparently due to different materials and sun lightening he had identified seven different colours of wood in the saloon alone.

So clearly we needed another approach we spoke to Stevie Pike from Watercraft UK based in Ipswich.

We discussed some options and looked into a way we could return the wood in the saloon to its former glory using an iron-on veneer.

This was not an easy job.  All of the headlining had to come down and each panel done individually.  The temperature is very important too or there can be problems with adhesion.  With lots of painstaking work each panel was recovered and then stained.  Clearly this isn’t going to be equivalent to a brand new luxury boat but the results are impressive and this has made her look 100% better. Now we just need to keep the curtains and blinds closed to protect the wood from the sun!

Unfortunately, Moody yachts are famous for problems with the headlining. Ours was made worse because every window in the saloon leaked which meant that rainwater went behind the headlining and destroyed the glue between the headlining and the fibreglass. when we first got the boat, we found that the headlining near the curtains was actually falling off the wall.

We spoke to Stevie at Watercraft UK about what we could do and he worked with a specialist to try and resolve this problem.  Some of the work was excellent, double stitching looked good etc. The problem we have had is that the glue has not been sticking well enough.  So we are still looking for the perfect solution but it is a lot better than it was. We then did the same in the sea berth but have had problems there too with the headlining sticking to the ceiling – more thought required.

Maria and I both enjoy our music and when we bought the boat there was an adequate stereo that fed speakers in the saloon and cockpit. This was an area we had improved in the Dufour by buying a Bluetooth enabled stereo that could link to any device. We decided that the same would work well on the Moody.

I have noticed on car stereos before that some come with a remote control. Why would you need that? You are next to the stereo, it is probably easier to press the button on the radio itself, isn’t it. And who wants to leave someone in the back of the car with control of the music – a recipe for disaster and probably a bit of Abba (same thing in my eyes, sorry Amanda!). However, on a boat, Bluetooth to your own device and a remote control come into their own. We will quite often set the volume at a reasonable level and then fine tune it with the iPad volume control, usually that means turning it up when Maria’s favourite song comes on 🙂

This was the best 100 pounds I spent on the Dufour and it makes everything so convenient on the Moody.

Of course those that know us well will know that Maria also has a fully portable Karaoke setup (bookings now being taken for her world tour…) and also a portable speaker “brick” from Bose which is excellent especially in a cubby hole or against a wall.

Let’s just say that the music options are covered. I wonder if I can dig out a video at this point of Maria singing……

As part of the purchase of the Moody, we had commissioned a survey of the vessel which included a basic survey of the engine.  It would have been possible to have a full engine survey, and with hindsight this would have been money well spent, on an engine with 3,000 hours on it.  Our surveyor did his initial review of the engine both out and in the water and didn’t report anything amiss.

We had been out in Mariadz a few times as we got used to her but had noticed that there was a little smoke and felt that we should get the engine looked at.  We decided to leave it until the back end of the season and started this work in October 2013.  We asked for Travis Westwood to look at the engine for us, he had previously done some work for us on the Dufour and we felt that this had always been reasonable.  With apologies for the poor quality of the pictures, Travis reported a disaster on both the generator (another story) but also on the engine.  The picture shows an extensive amount of corrosion in the heat exchanger which means that the entire unit needed to be replaced and we were lucky not to have caused serious issues when using it.  At the same time it was clear that the “recent service” that had been done would have identified these issues and if detected early, the problem we now found could have been avoided.  I had the receipt for the most recent service which had been an oil and filter change.  I compared this with the Yanmar recommended checklist for a 3,000 hour service….clearly there had been some mistake.

I decided that in view of the state of the engine and the fact that it had been serviced a matter of months previously that I would speak to the engineer who had done the service.  This gentleman in the Solent area, who specialises in Yanmar, was happy to tell me that he was in fact the engineer that had originally fitted the engine into the Moody and he was happy to help.  He wasn’t quite so happy when I started to ask him about his more recent dealings with the engine. I asked him why he had not serviced the Yanmar engine in line with the manufacturers stipulations.  His first reaction was to say that the Yanmar instructions in the engine manual did not need to be followed! Frankly I found that attitude unbelievable. He then added that he had been specifically told by the owners not to service the engine correctly, and just to change the oil and filters.  This is exactly the same service he had performed on the engine three years previously when it had last been professionally serviced.  Having met the Sharpe’s who sold us the boat, and knowing that they are not marine engineers, I did not believe that they had specifically told the engineer not to service the engine in line with the manufacturers requirements.  I am sure they just wanted the engine serviced before selling.

So we had the engine serviced in line with the recommendations for a 3,000 hours service.  This included injectors being serviced amongst other things.  It also included a completely new heat exchanger at great expense – thousands of pounds.  this work was done by Travis who at the time was the marine engineer who did most of our mechanical work.

At the end of all of this work, the engine ran well although a little smoky from cold, which is apparently to be expected.  It also meant that we realised at some stage in the future and before we left on our trip we would need to have the engine thoroughly reviewed to make sure we don’t get a very expensive repair or even worse replacement as we go round the world.

Apparently there are few jobs worse than a blocked toilet on a boat, I can use the term “heads” but trying to be inclusive will use a term that non-yachties will understand. Anyway, no one wants to have to work out the blockage in a toilet system in a confined space with some pretty nasty smells and mess. It is bad enough in a domestic setting, a boat is much worse.

So it was with great joy that we found on our second use of the boat, that the toilet system had blocked. The problem is that the waste pipes that carry the water and human waste to the holding tank get a deposit within them caused by urine reacting to the salt water. Over time this builds up until the pipes can take very little without blocking. It almost becomes like the Greek model where the only thing allowed down the toilet has to have gone through you. Mariadz still had the original pipe work, and clearly the toilets had been used a fair bit….try not to think about that too much because the circumference of the pipe had reduced from an inch and a quarter ( as I recall) to less than the diameter of a 5p piece. So what is the cure? You have a choice here. The first option is to plug both ends (very important that bit) get the pipe off the boat (very difficult that bit) and thrash the pipe on the floor (just urgh! And what happens if you haven’t plugged it effectively??) to shift the deposit before replacing said pipe. The second is that you do the important and difficult bits before throwing away said pipe and replacing with brand new, clean perfect pipes. Now we are not ones to shirk a nasty job and in fact Maria helped Stevie from Watercraft UK to do this for us. Our concern was that firstly, you needed to be sure that the amount of thrashing was sufficient or you were going to be doing the whole job again very shortly. Secondly, the pipes were 15 years old and likely to be brittle, what was the chance of a minor split being introduced by the thrashing resulting in a glorious and messy hunt for a hole in the pipe that you can guarantee would be in an inaccessible place and was resulting in a rich aroma of human waste emanating from the bilge? We calculated the chances…..it was 0.00000001%. We decided it was just too risky. Brand new pipes were installed. That sounds simple, it isn’t. The pipe runs on a Moody are difficult and it took a lot of work to get the pipes out at all, in fact some had to be cut – lucky we were replacing them! The new pipes were a little easier to get in not least of all because we did change some of the routing to make this simpler.

The second part of the operation was to review the toilet in the state room. In most marine toilets, you have enjoyable, and fitness enhancing pump action where you first fill the toilet with water before evacuating it into the pipe work, finally cleaning with another few pumps. On Bavarias and Dufours, six pumps three times was adequate. With the Moody and its unique, read very long, pipe work you would be best at around about twenty times three unless you would like to leave something in the pipe work to react with sea water and return us to the fine mess we had started with. This would then involve thrashing again, and this time I imagine a) i could be the recipient and b) I would be certainly doing the messy bit on my own since Maria had done her stint and knew how gross it was! The advantages of an electric toilet are many. Firstly, it is likely to have a macerater built in which chops up everything going into the pipe into small, easy to digest (for the pipe work) chunks so no mess 🙂 Secondly, there is a pump for the water so no hand cranking sixty times, massively improving upper body strength but no fun.

So that will be two electric toilets then. No. The clue is in the title, electric toilets require electricity. What if there was a problem with power for some reason. We don’t want to be using a bucket (and chuck it!) – that would be another thrashing and this time not for the pipe. We decided to leave the forepeak toilet as a pump action so that, in the event of a total power failure, we still have the use of a loo. Of course it means that guests of Mariadz also get the opportunity to develop their biceps and tone their upper body. It also means that I go into the heads and give it a thorough pump through, 180 pumps (hey I’m a fitness freak 😉 ), after visitors.

The upshot is that we expect that with the precautions we have taken, and the cheapest degradeable toilet paper known to man, we are hoping that we will not have to deal with blocked pipes again in our time of ownership – That is how bad it is!

I can’t believe that I have written so much on toilets! Tune in next time for something even more tedious and gruesome 🙂

I may have mentioned Mornin’ Gorgeous a few times during the purchase of our Moody 54, but it has to be said she was an inspiration for some of the things to do. Another one of these ideas was the fitting of a heated towel rail in the state room heads. On the Dufour we had used the shower once, the emptying of the shower using the pump made a lot of noise and the boat seem to shake, there was also water left in the system which would come across the heads when we heeled. All in all, we decided it was easier to use the marina facilities since we weren’t living aboard.

However, the Moody is a different matter with a large shower cubicle and powerful warm shower. With a ton of water, there is no reason not to use the facilities on the boat.

We opted for a nice simple, domestic 240v Electric Heated Towel Rail that means that you have lovely warm towels after a shower. I suspect this will be more important in an English Winter than a Bahamian Summer.

When we initially viewed the Moody, on the hard, we understood that the tarpaulin over the boom was a means of protecting the boat from bird droppings.

Apparently the word gullible isn’t in the dictionary either.

Due to travel and work commitments, we couldn’t collect the boat from the Solent to bring her to Ipswich and so we engaged the services of a skipper and crew to sail our Dufour down to the South Coast and return with our new Moody. The weather was pretty poor for this journey and it rained for most of the trip. The wind was also on the nose both ways (own often does that seem to be the case?)

It was therefore a little bit of a surprise when the Moody finally arrived in Ipswich to find a distinctive damp smell and the bilges full of fresh water. The culprit was a window leak….all of them! So that explained the tarpaulin 🙂

Apparently this is a common fault in older Moody’s and it was not a difficult fix to reseal all of the windows. we sealed the outside of the windows with Sabatack® 720. The inside of the windows is accessible if you take down the headlining but initially we decided to just do the outside to start.

Three years later we have not had another leak from any of the windows despite some variations in hot and cold, a lot of rain and some green water over them.

Unfortunately the leaks had caused more damage to the headlining which was literally falling off in places because the water had got behind the headlining and the glue had failed but that was another day and another job.